If a Bullet Hit a Bird
by Disguise of Carnivorism
Summary: It is said that in the center of the labyrinth you can sometimes find the minotaur. Fakir and Duck are more likely to just get very, very lost.
1. Chapter 1

"_There was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one."  
><em>_-_Everything and Nothing, Jorge Luís Borges

She is found beside the pond, stretched thin between the twilight of the day and the twilight of the evening. The sun has just finished painting the golden feathers embedded in her red hair and the blinding glare within her eyes. One foot remains in the water where it cannot be seen. And always her blue eyes search the horizon for something she has lost.

I find her there, trapped between the blank pages in my mind. Her eyes implore me always. She reaches out for me tentatively, as if she has forgotten my name, or is trying to. I glimpse her in fragments, in that clear blue gaze, in her attentiveness, and in my own dimming memories.

I came to her as God within a dream, illuminated her destiny, and told her thinly that she was only what I had intended for her to be, that her purpose was to be that which supported others. Her purpose had ended, and so she too must end her active role and return to that which she had been before. The story was written, the words were finished, and reality was looming with the waves above our heads.

"I don't remember much from before," she told me once in a shaking, perilous voice. "Most of the stuff comes after… It starts with Drosselmeyer, I think. Yeah, it starts there, but… sometimes I think that stuff came before…"

Of course at the time, I replied that this trivial detail was of no importance—because after all, everyone agrees that a duck is a duck.

Even now I hear Drosselmeyer's amused laughter and the gnashing of the clock's crooked teeth.

You see, it's so easy to forget that she was ever real, to forget that she once wore human hands and human blue eyes while the rest of us took it all for granted. It's so easy to bind her in a wedding veil of golden feathers and place her beside the pond in our minds. She's only a duck, she's only a duck, she's only a duck.

I have forgotten, in my haste, my ink-stained hands that write so dutifully and fervently are not God's.

When it rains outside I hear her laughter, her sparkling droplets of laughter, flinging itself against my windowpane.

The shadows stretch long in the twilight world; the trees beside the pond are painted black by their brothers and her cheeks are colored a faint rose by the fading light. I draw back the veil of golden feathers and look into those blue eyes and ask if she will help me build the human form again.

She reminds me dutifully of the eye color, the hair color, the words, the phrases, the smile, the pattern of steps. My pen follows her. The duck, the girl, the swan, the princess, the ballerina—I capture her and label her, I dissect her and stitch her back together in feverish haste, as if she is slipping away from me.

You can't expect any better from me. I am the writer, after all: it is in my nature to falsify and magnify and stitch things together in the wrong places. It's what I do.

In my mind I hold her frail hand. I smile at her and she smiles back. Neither of us mentions the worlds we have lost and the people whom we have forgotten. I am dancing with her at the bottom of a lake; she is stumbling and falling and she asks me why, but I have forgotten my own answers. I assume that I have always been right. We dance and we dance and I know that I can no longer see her—my eyes are blurred with these damned tears.

"It's okay, Fakir," she says softly, and though I cannot see I know there are tears in her eyes as well. "It's okay."

And God said unto the duck that she shalt remain a duck, for that was what God willed.

(And though she stands before me, a duck turned to a girl, I know there is something missing, some crucial word I have forgotten. My crippled hand aches with its weight. There is some light missing from her eyes; they burn like pale fire. Though I gaze into them, I know that I will only see my own reflection there.)

Some part of her is still lost, still waiting by that pond. She looks up through the waves, a pale glimmer of moonlight upon the bottom of the silt, and the inhuman loneliness in her eyes is blinding.

I have caught mere glimpses of her, like scattered light all around me. I could not see all her colors—she is blinding in her entirety. The words are only the symbol. In translation something is lost in the shadow upon Plato's cavern wall.

She is stitched together, my beautiful Duck, my beautiful paper doll.

I have laid my pen back down, now, and I don't wish to pick it up again—my crippled hand is tired of these rushed, incomplete phrases. I am tired of searching through this forest of endless words and letters.

You see, the story isn't a story. The story is a labyrinth, and at the center I will find her or I will find the minotaur.

She holds my hand in the twilight. It no longer matters, though; the ink has long since dried.

Sometimes in the darkness, I hear her dim, apologetic words: "It's not your fault, Fakir." A part of my soul dies.

It's so terribly easy, so frightfully easy to forget that which you love most (forgive me Duck, please forgive me). Even as I tell myself this, I close my eyes and see that empty spot inside her soul standing beside the still water.

A duck is a duck is a duck is a duck is a duck is a duck is a duck said the writer, and so mote it be.


	2. Chapter 2

"_Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page." _

-Borges and I, Jorges Luís Borges

There is another man who wears my name. He waits now in the corner, almost invisible, but not quite. To the unwary eye he resembles the paper flowers that adorn the wall, those cheery yellow petals that stare back at me unwittingly, but his eyes are jade daggers and are so very sharp amid the sunflowers.

He's looking at me now, watching me through those twin stars that dance behind his wallpaper disguise. His dark-clad arms are crossed and a frown graces his pale and sharp features. I don't think he trusts the pen in my fingers or the glances I send desperately toward him. I can't say I blame him—in the end I don't trust him either.

He calls himself Fakir, but he is referred to by other names as well. He is the writer, the story spinner, the judge, the editor, and sometimes he's Drosselmeyer. Like death, he waits patiently in black, a cloak thrown over his thin shoulders, the sword casually waiting beside his crippled writing hand. Just in case things don't go according to plan.

He's not watching me, of course: he's watching the girl. I'm only there by association. I'm the problem, the word that needs to be edited out—except he can't quite bring himself to do it because it would ruin the tone of the piece. Such a pity to have to start over again when it was all turning out so beautifully.

She's sleeping now. Her red hair spills across my chest; her eyes close delicately. I trace the scars of raven's claws across her back and I wonder what shape the ink made when it formed the words that tore her flesh. Her soft blue eyes have closed and for a moment there is no pain, no loneliness, no death and no hope of salvation. There is only her in my arms and the writer, careful eyes tracking her from across the room.

She doesn't see him. Her blue eyes skip past him, wander over him, although she claims to have seen him once. She often does that, though—she becomes lost in her own rewritten world and in the fog steps over what she should have seen in the beginning. It's not her fault that she doesn't see the inevitable in an invisible man's yellow-feathered pen.

I remember the first time I saw her—how my eyes slid over her scars and her fear, slid over her red hair and her terrified eyes. I walked past her, around her, as if she was only a cog in the great machine that whirred above my head. She was only a word in a story, then, a scattering of yellow light (yellow flowers) painted upon the academy walls.

She stumbled into the practice room. The eyes were upon her like ravens on a corpse. She stood amid the sea of unfamiliar faces, a duck out of water, drowning in their curiosity and indifference. Dangling from her neck there was a blood red pendent, like the egg of the firebird streaking across the sky; it glowed in the sunlight and lit the terrified sea trapped in her eyes.

She said her name was Duck and that she wanted to dance. She didn't say anything else, but like a third eye, the necklace caught the light dutifully and stared at the crowd until they were amazed into silence.

She faded then, a wobbling, weak-legged girl with desperate, pale hands and a hesitant smile. I danced past her and around her, seeing nothing of her face or her eyes, seeing only the clumsy legs ahead of mine. It was only at the end that I saw her eyes.

She stood, staring at the prince and the princess, Mythos and Rue, the dove and the raven in each other's arms. There was a stillness in her that spoke of eternity. The bottom of a well in which a stone is dropped, where one stands and can only see the ripples on the edge as the stone sinks into the shadows—that depth of stillness. In her eyes was the reflection of her heart being torn in half by casual indifference; their blue reflected the emptiness that accompanies a lake covered in fog.

Like hastily written words that bleed into the page, she ran from the room. The expression was forgotten. Although I did not see him then, I now know that in the corner the writer stood, and that his dagger eyes followed the sunlight trapped in her necklace as it travelled westward beyond his sight. I know, too, that he then followed her, the firebird, across the night sky, following the trail of golden feathers she had left behind.

I noticed her through repetition. The Prince and the Raven trapped in her hands, her legs shaking terribly, her blue eyes watching in horror as her world was ripped away from her. Repetition, repetition, repetition drew my eye to the black-feathered duck. She was positively covered in ink, if I had ever bothered to look.

She is three women, my Duck.

I saw her, the swan, a red shard of glass trapped in her hand. It cut its way into the abyss in the prince's chest. He screamed in agony, she smiled gently, and I watched by the lake. There was no darkness in her—only white light and the red blood of the prince's queen of hearts. But when she turned to me, in her eyes a raven took flight.

I saw her, the raven, her toe shoes painted black, watching enviously as the prince took his Rue by the hand and danced with her in the candlelight night. She followed them, a shadow against the wall, scattered light amid the stars. There was only the fire and the blood, nothing of heaven, nothing of love. I saw her and she turned to me. I knew that she saw past my haggard existence and straight into my withered soul.

"I'm really just a crow (I'm really just a duck)," she tells me when only I am there to listen, "but sometimes I don't feel like a crow (duck). Sometimes I wake up and I feel normal, but then I look at them and I know… It hurts, sometimes."

It was only natural that I should confront her, dangerous as she was, with her black (pink) toe shoes and her white (red) form. She held the book in her hands, the unfinished novel, and she smiled as if she had been expecting me all along. Her hair was tied back in its usual braid and in her form there was no hint of swan or raven, only the girl with her bright blue eyes. She clashed with the library, not belonging to the world of words or fables; her bright hair was too full of sunshine for such a dreary home. (Outside the crows sat upon the windowsill and in the cedar limbs with glittering eyes and hungry smiles.)

Duck, you do not belong in my world.

"You're Tutu and you're the raven," I said to her. She nodded to one and denied the other with a shrug. Both motions were casual, almost as if they require no thought, no tortured confession. To her they were merely words, words that were written in some other world by a man with eyes like the lake of despair.

"You're the knight, but you're the writer too," she said with a wistful smile, as if that explained everything (it explained nothing). She closed the novel then. The raven and the prince grinned at me brightly from the cover; the princess was nowhere in sight. I am not on the cover either, although I have searched there for my torn flesh.

"What are you trying to say?"

Her eyes glittered then, like the crow's when it has spied something strange, some fallen star amidst the weeds. She was not smiling, but rather her expression drew inward; all the while her eyes danced like words in the furnace—words being burned alive. "You don't remember?"

"No, and I don't enjoy being riddled with." I paused, then, my mind trapped by the fleeting light of some other world in her eyes. "I don't particularly care what you want with Mythos, but I need you to know that whatever you intend, I will stop it. Don't stand in my way."

I realized her words too late. Now all I can see is my own cruel reflection beside the lake with a red pendant in his hand.

She then told me her story, her hands guiding her words through the air, her eyes lighting in the right places and darkening in others. She had been born the deformed daughter of the raven, and she was his greatest disappointment. No one could love her, because how could anyone love anything that had two (four) faces? There was only the prince, the prince who loved everyone (no one)—only he could stand to kiss Janus on the cheek.

"He didn't, though. Father lied. He does that sometimes, when he thinks it's funny or when I'm not listening. The prince doesn't love anyone, but if he did, it wouldn't be me. When the prince looks at her, at Rue, it's like there's nothing else in the world. I don't exist anywhere, not at home, and not there. For the prince, I'm not even real." The girl's hands paused here, as if searching for some distant phrase or drifting over the bottom of an abyss. She sighed, then, and looked at Fakir with eyes that seemed terribly old.

"It doesn't matter, though. Without his heart he's not real, either." She shrugged again; her thin shoulders rose and fell slightly.

Her other words were drowned out by the cawing of the crows.

The crows followed her, tormented her. Outside of the practice room they waited patiently, their talons aching for her swan's blood. She danced and danced, her feet bleeding, but always the crows waited and she didn't leave. She had no place left to go.

I took her into my home because she needed my help, she needed the knight. Then I knew who had given her that pendant, although she had never told me. I know whose words traced the scars her father's crows had torn into her flesh. I know, too, whose feet echo hers in the pas de deux she dances beside the lake.

I do not know what tragedy befell her, before his words warped reality. Perhaps it was winter that stripped her of her wings, left her frozen in the snow before his feet. Perhaps it was the bullet of a gun, an eager hunter who could not hear his screaming. Perhaps she simply left, and he found himself alone in the dark with the machinery of his own writing ticking in his head.

I pick up the pen for him, for her, not for myself. I pick it up for that other Fakir, because he is spiriting her away even as I write. I see his ending now, the girl who is loved by no one, a fallen star, a firebird streaking across the sky. Her father has abandoned her, in her prince's fantasy she is only dust and scattered light—but to the writer she is everything. She takes his hand and she leaves this world (she leaves me) and she smiles for the first time in her life, all the scars forgotten, the weariness and the hatred gone. Only their eyes, like stars…

I write, but as I write I realize that I too am creating a story in which I am reflected. In creating her I create myself: I create another Fakir who will cling to her with all his might. The words are the walls of the labyrinth, twisting and changing as each Fakir picks up his pen in defiance of the fate proposed by the other.

I then know that this Fakir, this author beside me, is not the first just as I am not the last. My image is cast across infinity and eternity.

In the twilight of the room my hand stalls.


	3. Chapter 3

_"Diodorus Siculus relates the story of a broken and scattered god; who of us has never felt, while walking through the twilight or writing a date from his past, that something infinite had been lost?"  
><em>-Paradiso, XXXI, 108, Jorges Luis Borges

There exists, in a realm that rests safely within the dreaming world, a prince who wed a witch. She is quite beautiful, the witch queen, her skin a pale reflection of the snow upon the pauper's grave, her eyes the rose, and her smile the words erased by the passing of time. The prince remarks upon this often, as if her beauty somehow dispels her raven's blood; he forgets that her beauty is her blood, and that in the end she is both the crow and the woman.

Heart filled, he finds her beside the window, wearing black, her bare feet resting gently across the stone sill as her garnet eyes search the face of the indifferent moon. She does not turn to him and he thinks, dimly, thinly, that he is losing her somehow—that somewhere in the words, his Rue has left him for the world resting in the heavens. He never was one for extensive thought, though, and it slips away soon. He is left only looking at her.

She is Helen's rue, her starry-eyed regret as she looked down at the world she had destroyed with her beauty. She is the face of the moon where once there had only been the scorching sun and man's mad desire to fly. When she looks at him, he sees only something that has existed after something else—only an end, not a fable.

He changes so often that he finds it hard to look in a mirror. His face never seems to stand still; his thoughts roam through his eyes and his emotions scar his flesh. For this reason, he often doesn't meet her eyes.

"I had a dream about Fakir," she says absently, not to him but to the night and her own raven's blood. She doesn't ever say things to him—she only smiles. He knows this. Every time he thinks it, a shard of his heart aches and threatens to split, so he tries not to think it.

"We were walking along the garden path; the windows acted as mirrors, reflecting only what we wanted to see. He looked different, not quite older but not younger either—perhaps sharper is the best word, as if he had turned into that enchanted sword he borrowed from you." She turns to him with passive interest, as if he is merely the tool to be used to prop up her speech.

"How was he?" the prince asks, almost in spite of himself. She shrugs and looks out the window once again. Her face reflects the yellow moon's loneliness. The prince finds himself thinking of that other world he left behind, the world that was little more than a fog for him, less real than the intangible dreams he has at night when his heart melts into nothingness and the world slips from his fingertips.

"He wore Drosselmeyer's old cape and hat; the feathers almost concealed his face. I asked him where on earth he found it, and he said that it had been waiting in his closet. I asked him what I would find in my own closet and he said, 'raven feathers'. It was almost twilight in the garden, but something of the sunshine still remained because I could see the grim color in his eyes. 'Things have changed,' he said. 'Duck and I are the only ones left now'. Except I didn't know what he meant."

"Did he say anything else?" This time the prince wants to know because he can see it; he can see those things that she isn't quite saying. They're hiding beneath the surface—like the heart shards, his heart shards dancing beneath the skin of so many people, playing them like marionettes.

Her back is still to him, as if she, too, is searching for that world she left behind for him, for everything she had ever known and loved. She doesn't belong to the place where she belongs; that world had forsaken her, and she had left it behind for him, for everything.

"Oh yes. He had a lot to say, considering it was only a dream."

He wants to sit beside her, feeling again that aching rip in his heart. Loneliness, he calls it, he thinks it—but he isn't quite sure. He never is quite sure. Rue always knows what she is feeling, Rue is her feelings: she is the loneliness and the pain, the sorrow and the rage. She is all those heart shards lost in his soul, and somehow because of that, he feels he doesn't know her at all.

"What did he say?" he asks again, but even before he asks he has that feeling, intuition, Fakir called it, that Rue isn't going to answer.

She smiles and her silent words shake his soul.

She takes his hand and leans against him, abandoning her windowsill and her yellow moon for the moment, perhaps recognizing that they are only a story (not real) and that he is the only real (not real) thing there is in this world. He holds her close, the heart shard fear screaming in his chest, just as it did when Tutu walked away from him with those sorrowful (accepting) blue eyes. He doesn't want to lose her; he feels that if he loses her—intuition again—that if he loses her, there will be nothing left but words and heart shards and ravens.

(In the night, the yellow moon smiles down at him. He can't help but shudder.)

They walk together down the corridor in perfect unison. Her eyes are not on his but rather on the stone floor. Their path is lit by candle light, and to the prince, the shadows almost look like crows, red eyes centered in the flames as their black feathers stretch onto the ceiling. Rue has always been surrounded by crows; there were crows everywhere before, always watching her, watching him. Crows and crows feathers, watching avidly from the walls and ceiling.

The curiosity suddenly wants to know what she edited. Surely there are things left unsaid; he wants to know why she said only what she said and what she left behind in the world of dreams.

They are in the bedroom now. He is clutching her in vain; his hands tangle in her midnight hair as he watches her slip away into that world of dreams. A dream within a dream, he thinks vaguely, a thought that reminds him of his own dream within a dream, that terrifying world called reality, which houses the writer (whom he has almost forgotten) and the Duck (whom he wishes he could forget). He sees when she leaves him, when her soul departs and he is left with a shell, a sleeping doll. Her hands relax and her face becomes numb and indifferent; her hair becomes limp in his hands and she is covered in shadows.

He is a guest in her dream within a dream, yet somehow he sees it in his mind's eye—like the crow sitting in the tree he watches her, and his eye is the only thing moving. It is twilight again; the earth is melting into the sky and he can't seem to find the borders between life and death. She's wearing scarlet, her satin shoes are black, and she walks hand in hand with Fakir, who wears his grandfather's clothes.

"I know it was you," she says accusingly, as if it is somehow his fault and that his pen truly does hold power over both life and death. He doesn't smile (as Drosselmeyer would have, no doubt), but he does pause and regards her carefully, as if she is something not to be trifled with.

Tyger, tyger burning bright, thinks the prince as he watches from his perch in the tree.

"Do you regret it?" he asks. He sounds different—sharper, perhaps. The prince can see that his hands are stained with ink and that his eyes are harder than they used to be.

"It was supposed to be her; she was supposed to be the princess. Every day I wake up and I think it's her in my place, and that I'm still just a crow, just a girl everyone's forgotten about. He killed her because of me—he didn't give her a second thought because of me. I wake up and there are crow feathers in my hair and nothing, nothing there is real, nothing lasts." She pauses for a breath and looks around her, as if terrified by her surroundings, as if this twilight world is only a cage that she gilded for herself.

"Reality's harder than this." God answers carefully—because he is something of a god, isn't he?

"You're right, reality is harder than this. But the world I live in is nothing more than this—just an image printed in words. There was something greater in that other world, something lasting, something that I have lost. In my world there is everything: there are witches and sorcerers, dragons and fae… and princes. There are princes, too."

God in the feathers with the ink stained hands looks at her as if she has transformed (as if she hasn't changed at all). He doesn't smile, but then, Fakir never was one for smiling.

"He's only a doll, Rue. You can't expect anything more from him."

"What do you mean?"

The prince can almost see the sword in his hand, almost like Fakir had never managed to drop it despite all his pretty words and his ink stained papers. He was the knight who tried but could never quite do it, the knight whose destiny was to be torn in half, crumpled like paper stained by useless words.

"You know what I mean, Rue. When you look at him, what do you see? I see something quite different, just as Duck sees something different. I see a foil, I see something that serves only to support that which is real. By himself he is nothing. He is only what we tell him to be, and if he thought at all, if he existed at all, it was only because Duck thought he should."

In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes? The forest is growing darker, and the prince finds he has trouble making out their forms; they have blurred together in his own apathetic fog. The twilight is fading, yet the twilight is what blurs them together, not the darkness. In the orange-gold light he sees the reflection of his own eyes; he has to turn from the sight of that half-lidded eye in the horizon for fear that he might see himself reflected there.

He sees the girl dancing there—not Rue, but the other one, the one he noticed only dimly. Fakir's princess. The light steps softly through her red hair and the twilight plays across her features with a careless joy that the prince could only blink at softly. His heart breaks inside his chest against the weight of his old sword. She looks so young, too young, much younger than he remembered her being. He wants to call her name, but along the way he has forgotten it. Now he only retains a shadow of those eyes, those blue eyes that gleamed like twin moons.

"He was your friend," Rue states as if words were supposed to mean something important.

"Yes, but only because I told him he was."

The girl is dancing beneath his tree. The prince hardly notices the conversation, he is so entranced by her bare feet and her carefree smile. This girl is different, this is the girl he did not see—the girl he glanced over with her bright laughter and her blue eyes. He can't remember her name, but he needs to call her because she is all he has forgotten, all that was once real in the world. Time shifts delicately beneath her feet and the twilight surrounds her as a halo.

He sees then the dread hand, the dread feet, that it is Fakir's hand upon her shoulder. He sees then the feathered God, the green lizard upon his back, and he understands the infinite and the machinery of the world.

In the world of the dream, the nameless prince sees the tyger.

He falls from the tree like a crow. Somehow, he manages to laugh as his feathers float gently down above him.

He wakes up shivering. Rue is asleep in his arms, and the moon is smiling, smiling, smiling down upon him.


	4. Chapter 4

_"We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods."_  
>-Ragnarök, Jorges Luis Borges<p>

I have little time to spend with old acquaintances, though I know they often spend their time with me. I prefer not to spend my time with old ghosts. My hands are filled with their dried blood; why should I lose more time than I must? There are wars, miracles, realities, fantasies—all worlds to fill my time. I have saved only one (chosen only one) and that is enough for me. It must be enough.

I believe they would protest if ever they were to read this. I burn everything I don't intend to keep. I am the illusionist: I only play at power. I am not God (though sometimes I fear I am becoming him). This will be in ashes by the morrow and she will never read a word of it. She has only seen the final draft of her own work, the work that brought her back—she has not seen the years of crumpled paper that kept the fire alive.

I believe that I would find them arguing, thinking I still care, that I still watch them and control their fates. They place far too much omnipotence in me; half their plot is their own doing. I am only the master of the words, those shaded puppets: nothing more (but nothing less, either).

It's not Siegfried's fault. He does try. He sits in his palace with his crown upon his head and he truly does believe that he is a good king. He was chosen by the gods, after all. He does not realize that he still belongs to my grandfather's tale. The tale doesn't stop in the words; it seeps into the bones. He is a good man, if he is a man at all—because in the end he was born to be a lesson, not a person. I do believe that he has yet to realize this.

I see them crowded in their chambers, her with the red eyes his with the gold. They look at each other and try not to think of their curses. She, the witch, he, the demon: it's in their blood and they have both tried to bleed themselves dry. Crow's feathers are everywhere and I fear that their kingdom is doomed.

He is still the bastard, beneath that smile. He is still the rapist, murderer, liar, thief. He thinks he hides it well because his face is so carefully blank. Perhaps you fool them, but I am not them and neither are you. You know what waits in the night, in the shadows, in that dark cracked corner of your heart.

Not all sins are forgiven, my friend.

What were you before you took that sword and shattered your heart? A prince who loved everyone and was loved by everyone, you tell me. And what is that Siegfried? A lover, a friend, a monster… Even in your raven's feathers you still followed those guidelines, vague and self-indulgent as they are.

Siegfried decides to play a game as he sits across from his wife, his hand on her pale hand, his eyes on hers. He thinks about the other princess, whose name always slips his mind; he thinks about her red hair and her strange blue eyes. Strange, he thinks, what I feel when I think about her instead. With Rue, it is rawness. It is seduction, terror, fear, and protectiveness, and something he thinks might be love. He has forgotten what the other princess means to him. He left her beside the lake, and sometimes he thinks he might have killed her in the end.

He had given her his heart shard, and then he took it back as if it meant nothing. It did, he thinks.

He thinks about me, oh yes, I am in his thoughts at times. He thinks that there is a strange coincidence. That he started to forget, that she began to slip, only when I picked up the pen. She was already lost to you, Mytho. You had already condemned her to death in one story; why would I allow you to do it in another?

Some things, some actions, are unintentional yet are not regretted. I do not regret what influence, what unseen intention, guided my pen. I do not regret that you chose Rue instead and left that forgotten girl with me. Perhaps it is not the same for you. But honestly, I doubt you care enough to ponder it for long.

The truth is that you were never real to me. You are the story. Nothing more. Even in your own tale, you are the improbable cursed prince, and they treat you as such. You have no more substance than that.

So with your raven's blood, your black magic, your bruised hands, and your battered eyes you dared to summon me. Like some court magician you once knew, you called upon your wizards and your witches to summon me into your world. As if I owed you something.

There are crops to plant, curses to lift, fortune to bring… So many things must spring forth from the writer's pen. I am not your friend, Mytho, Siegfried, whatever you may call yourself. I also am no illusionist or wizard. I stand above them, and you know this. I invented their art; their magic flows from my ink. Try not to forget this.

I am not God, though sometimes I fear I am becoming him.

There are reasons why I have never entered your world.

The tale is finished now, though, and I have cast the first of the pages into the flames. I won't wait this time. Perhaps I am afraid you'll come back for her, that you'll remember you once loved the white swan more than life itself. Though I doubt it.

The pages are curling in on themselves and through the red-rimmed ashes I see the portal between us drawing to a close.

The story must end somewhere…


End file.
